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We also studied this phenomenon in the real world. In one study, we followed 153 college students over five weeks. During stressful times, like final-exam week, students who believed that willpower was not limited reported eating less junk food and procrastinating less than students who did not share that belief. They also showed more academic growth, earning better grades that term than their “pessimistic” counterparts.

Furthermore, when we taught college students that willpower was not so limited, they showed similar increases in willpower. They reported procrastinating only once or twice a week instead of the two to three times a week reported by students in a control condition, and they cut down on excess spending, going beyond their budgets less than once a week instead of once or twice a week.

At stake in this debate is not just a question about the nature of willpower. It’s also a question of what kind of people we want to be. Do we want to be a people who dismiss our weaknesses as unchangeable? When a student struggles in math, should we tell that student, “Don’t worry, you’re just not a math person”? Do we want him to give up in the name of biology? Or do we want him to work harder in the spirit of what he wants to become?

It’s a nicely consice collection of recommendations, with two-page summaries for each one: 1. Space learning 2. Interleave worked examples with practice 3. Combine graphics w/ verbal descriptions 4. Connect abstract and concrete represent ations 5. Use quizzing to promote learning 6. Help students plan their time. 7. Ask deep questions.

The students who are successful, by contrast, look at that challenge, wrestle with feelings of inadequacy and stupidity, and then begin to take steps hiking that mountain, knowing that bruised pride is a small price to pay for getting to see the view from the top. They ask for help, they acknowledge their inadequacies. They don’t blame their lack of intelligence, they blame their lack of motivation.

You feel like you are burnt out or that you are on the verge of burning out, but in reality you are on the verge of deciding whether or not you will burn out.

Like real world resourcefulness, conversational resourcefulness often means doing things you don't want to. Chasing down all the implications of what's said to you can sometimes lead to uncomfortable conclusions. The best word to describe the failure to do so is probably "denial," though that seems a bit too narrow. A better way to describe the situation would be to say that the unsuccessful founders had the sort of conservatism that comes from weakness. They traversed idea space as gingerly as a very old person traverses the physical world. [1]The unsuccessful founders weren't stupid. Intellectually they were as capable as the successful founders of following all the implications of what one said to them. They just weren't eager to.

It is in free time that the special player develops, not in the competitive expedience of games, in hour-long practices once a week, in mechanical devotion to packaged, processed, coaching-manual, hockey-school skills

Mostly it is time unencumbered, unhurried, time of a different quality, more time, time to find wrong answers, to find a few that are right; time to find your own right answers; time for skills to be practiced, to set higher limits, to settle and assimilate and become fully and completely yours, to organize and combine with other skills comfortably and easily in some uniquely personal way, then to be set loose, trusted, to find new instinctive directions to take, to create.

students have been taught to place way too much importance on having the courage to follow their passions and change the world, and not nearly enough importance on having the persistence to first build the needed ability to both find concrete projects that matter and accomplish them.

The emphasis on personal achievement has done more than turn the admissions process into a race to rack up résumé points; more important, to the extent that elite colleges set the pace, it is turning the educational culture into one that stresses individual perfection instead of one that stresses social improvement.

At the turn of the last century, the influential philosopher John Dewey saw education as a democratizing force not just in its social consequences but in its very process. Dewey believed that education and life were inextricably bound, that they informed each other. Education wasn’t just something you did in a classroom to earn grades. It was something you lived.

There is a big difference between a culture that encourages engagement with the world and one that encourages developing one’s own superiority.

What are you noticing? Here are some of the things I notice I see the impact that our current grading systems have on students’ feelings of self-worth I see how children use shifts in (math) identity as a mechanisms for maintaining self-worth. I see how school reinforces a view in which your worth as human being can be mapped to your linear hierarchy I see how school reinforces the view that you intelligence and smarts are fixed attributes I see how one of the primary activities of school children is to avoid looking stupid and to maintain one’s standing in the hiearchy